Many Small Fires

In her first collection, Pence addresses her father’s schizophrenia and chronic homelessness through the larger evolutionary story of the human species. Questions about how we came to create communities and homes play out against more intimate questions of the speaker’s strange community and roving home. As the book moves from the speaker’s childhood in Georgia to her travels in Flores, Indonesia, we begin to understand a complex relationship between two people locked together by family.